As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
The increased use of technology and computers has generated a corresponding increase in digital data. This ever-increasing digital data requires a corresponding ever-increasing amount of storage space. The need for storage space for digital data has been fueled through many changes in society. For example, home computer users increased storage of multimedia data, especially video and photographic data, has served to increase the amount of storage space needed. Likewise, industry also requires increased storage space. As more and more business is being conducted electronically, there has been an ever-increasing demand and need for the storage of this vast amount of business data. Furthermore, there has been a demand to digitize the storage of once paper files in an attempt to decrease the overhead cost of this paper generation and storage.
With this increase of digital data, there has been a corresponding further reliance upon the integrity and required accessibility of the digital data. While storage device reliability has increased, these devices have not become infallible. One type of error that occurs in digital systems is a soft error (also known as a soft media error). Soft errors may occur when a hard drive fails to complete an input/output (I/O) access on the first pass, but does complete the I/O access after several retries. As used herein, an I/O access may also be referred to as an “I/O” or an “access.” As the I/O does complete, no blocks are reallocated, nor is the error reported to the operating system. When an excessive number of soft errors occur, drive performance may degrade significantly, and overall performance may be adversely affected. Such performance degradation may affect a range of products that include (and/or use) storage devices.
Existing approaches describe methods for soft error detection in storage subsystems. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,562,264, U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/516,909 (hereinafter “Tangvald”), and EMC CLARIION RAID 6 TECHNOLOGY (hereinafter “EMC”) describe soft error detection in storage subsystems. Existing approaches rely on writing two separate data sets and comparing the data sets to detect transient discrepancies between the data sets.